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Afrocentrism holds that Eurocentrism has led to the neglect or denial of the contributions of Africa's original peoples and focused instead on a generally European-centered model of world civilization and history. Therefore, Afrocentrism aims to shift the focus from a European-centered history to an Africa-centered history. More broadly, Afrocentrism is concerned with distinguishing the influence of European and Oriental peoples from indigenous African achievements. Many Afrocentrists in America consider the African identity of African Americans to be more important than their American nationality. Afrocentrism is also a scholarly, historiographical approach to the study of world history, with connections to black civil rights movements and anti-imperialist ideologies in the United States and the Caribbean. Afrocentrists typically focus on indigenous Africa and black contributions and posit black, Nilotic origins for Western civilization. Philosophically, Afrocentrism is often compared to Eurocentrism; the validity of this comparison is heavily debated. Egypt and the argument of African cultural unity Afrocentricity essentially makes the claim that early dynastic Egypt was an indigenous African civilization, though the claim had already been made by some historians and Africanists for a century or more. Modern geopolitics generally place Egypt in the Middle East; however, geographically, the modern-day nation (except for the Sinai peninsula) falls within the African continent. Afrocentricity argues that the salient, cultural characteristics of ancient Egypt are indigenous to Africa and that these features are present in other African civilizations. Critical of much of mainstream Egyptology, Afrocentrists are of the opinion that the study of ancient Egyptian culture artificially disconnects it from other early African civilizations, such as Kerma and the Meroitic civilizations of Nubia—particularly in light of the fact that archaeological evidence clearly indicates a confluence among this cultural triad. This perspective, championed by the Senegalese scholar Cheikh Anta Diop, is known formally as the Cultural Unity Theory. This theory has proponents outside Afrocentric circles, among them Bruce Williams of the Oriental Institute of Chicago. Afrocentrists claim that these civilizations made significant contributions to ancient Greece and Rome during their formative periods. The more conventional belief among mainstream archaeologists and Egyptologists such as Frank J. Yurco and Fekri Hassan and historians is that the ancient Egyptian civilization was related, in terms of culture and language, to the Afro-Asiatic language family spoken across northern Africa, Chad and the Horn of Africa and by the Beja of the Sudan. Somewhat curiously, however, this assumption does not recognize any significant similarities between a purportedly Semitic Ancient Egypt and other Mediterranean cultures beyond the Crescent. Further, mainstream scholars readily acknowledge that the earliest speakers of Tamazight, the language of the Maghreb Berbers of North Africa, originated among the black Berbers of Northeastern Africa and the Sahel; and the Beja are themselves an "Africoid" people.* The conventional belief in a Semitic Egypt has been challenged by scholars who believe the cultural similarities between Egypt and the Levant are due to the exportation of cultural elements from the Nilotic civilizations, rather than the reverse. As the predynastic period of Egypt, as well as all three dynastic periods had origins in the non-Semitic south (Naqada, Nubian C, Upper Egypt), Afrocentrists argue it is illogical to insist on a non-African, Semitic origin of dynastic Egyptian civilization. This Afrocentric view finds itself in direct opposition to the conclusions of mainstream, Eurocentric scholars such as British historian Arnold Toynbee, who regarded the ancient Egyptian cultural sphere as having died out without leaving a successor, and who derided as "myth" the idea that Egypt was the "origin of Western civilization." However, there are numerous accounts in the historical record dating back several centuries wherein scholars have written of an Egypt and its contributions to Mediterranean civilizations. The Greek historian Herodotus described the ancient Egyptians as "swarthy with woolly hair" (Histories Book 2:104). Also, the European to earn the status of the first European philosopher, Thales, who hailed from then Miletus, present day Turkey, was known to have calculated the height of the Egyptian Pyramid by its shadows, a proof that European philosophers went to Egypt to study. Francois Champollion described in his book L'Egypte the characteristics of the Egyptian people and their similarities to Nubians. In addition, Afrocentricity has growing popular support in academia. Increasingly, American colleges are treating Afrocentrism as a rigorous discipline of study open to peer review. However, Egyptian frescoes frequently show sub-Saharan Africans as distinct from themselves. One of Afrocentricity's most prominent critics, Mary Lefkowitz defending the mainstream view, has characterized Afrocentricity as "an excuse to teach myth as history." Likewise, African-American History professor Clarence E. Walker has proclaimed it to be "a mythology that is racist, reactionary, and essentially therapeutic." Afrocentrists, however, level similar charges at what they charge is a pronounced Eurocentrism in mainstream historical scholarship, and argue that the Afrocentrist approach merely attempts to set the historical record straight by overturning a false, racially skewed paradigm. History of Afrocentrism
The debate over Afrocentrism Critics counter that much historical Afrocentric research simply lacks scientific merit and that it actually seeks to supplant and counter one form of racism with another, rather than attempt to arrive at the truth. Among these critics, Mary Lefkowitz's Not out of Africa is regarded by some as the foremost critical work. In it, she contends Afrocentric historical claims are grounded in identity politics and myth rather than sound scholarship. Like most other mainstream scholars, she rejects James' views on the ground that his sources predate the decipherment of Egyptian hieroglyphs. She contends that actual ancient Egyptian texts show little similarity to Greek philosophy. She also contends that Bernal underestimates the distinctiveness of Greek intellectual culture. Asante, however, disputes her conclusions. Afrocentricity tends to emphasize the racial and cultural unity of Africa as a whole as the home of black, or "Africoid," peoples. However, mainstream scholars assert that Afrocentricity relies on a projection of modern racial and geographical categories onto ancient cultures in which they simply did not exist. It is argued that in ancient Western culture, the distinction between Europe and Africa was not as important as the notion that civilized peoples encircled the Mediterranean sea. The farther from the Mediterranean they were, the more alien they were considered to be. This applied to all peoples. The equation of "African" with black identity has also been criticized, partly because movement of populations around the Mediterranean in ancient times makes any rigid distinctions among North African, Asian, and European peoples of the area problematic; and partly because the notion of a unified "black" or Negroid race is itself considered to be unsustainable by many modern geneticists. Further, Diop's claim to have discovered a pan-African proto-language is rejected by almost all mainstream linguists. Although the Bantu language theory is still considered valid, if not in agreement with Diop's own, it describes the movement of a language family from the western African Sahel south and east into southern Africa, and would not include languages of northern or Mediterranean Africa, nor those of the Ethiopian region and east African coast. Scholarship summarized in eg. Jared Diamond's Guns, Germs and Steel points out that, to the extent that Bantu languages are pan-sub-Saharan-African languages, it appears to be because the Bantu people displaced or absorbed other African peoples within the last few thousand years, not because the Bantu language family is representative of some shared pan-African culture. However, the concept of race is not based on genetics, which is a far more modern discipline, but on phenotypes. Caucasians range from Iceland to India and from red, blond, brown, to black straight, wavy, or curly hair and from fair to dark skin. Black people range from West Africa, to Australia and Melanesia, with a range of brown and wavy haired people to the darkest skinned people with the curliest hair. Similarly, the Afrocentric concept of a "global African community" has been reinforced by the findings of numerous anthropologists, historians and others, who claim the blacks of New Guinea, Melanesia,and Southeast Asia are no less "Negroid" than the blacks of North and sub-Saharan Africa. Again, work summarized by Diamond indicates that this claim is incorrect; the peoples of New Guinea and Australia appear to be derived from peoples originally native to Taiwan, and certain extremely important technological developments, such as the domestication of crops, originated in New Guinea independent of the rest of the world, and well before crop domestication occurred in sub-Saharan Africa. The issue with the more respected mainstream viewpoint is that the definition of a Negroid phenotype begins to take a back seat to the genetic origins of those having negroid features. In addition, those people who fall in the extreme range of Caucasian, furthest from the blond, and who also fall in the extreme range of black, furthest from the darkest, are contentiously placed in either one group or another. Afrocentrists contend, by pointing out that white society excluded mixed people from being Caucasian, that whites should not therefore lay historical claims to those who in history share identical phenotypes and mixture with modern black people, especially when they live within the continent of Africa, and routinely intermarried with the darker skinned and more overtly black people of the region. Therefore for the Afrocentrists, the Ancient Egyptian would socially fit within the black sphere. Non-Afrocentric scholarship might reply that this, again, is projecting modern racial categories on ancient peoples; blond hair and blue eyes would not have been normative for ancient Mediterranean societies. People generally think of themselves and others as belonging to races defined by skin color and physiognomy and link this to ancestry. One of the impacts of this is that historical achievements are ascribed to races with which modern peoples identify themselves (and not necessarily as the historical people would have identified themselves). Some insist that this approach violates the fundamental demand of history as a discipline, which should aspire to understand events as they occurred, not as they affect the self-esteem of modern people. Afrocentricity, however, contends that race still exists as a social and political construct. They argue that racist conventions propounded for centuries– that blacks had no civilization, no written language, no culture, and no history of any note before coming into contact with Europeans– make the racial identity of ancient Egypt an important issue. Moreover, they point out that these misconceptions have been consistently applied to a particular, broad category of humanity based on the same "racial" phenotype and lineages. Most modern scholarship, Afrocentric or not, however, at least nominally rejects the old racist ideas that black people had no culture or history independent of whites; however, European history commonly receives more attention within the academy than the history of sub-Saharan African cultures or those of the many Pacific Island peoples. However, the matter of race became an important and enduring issue, Afrocentrism argues, when whites and others pronounced an entire segment of humanity inherently inferior. Further, such biases persist today. As a result, Afrocentricity contends, it is important to set the historical record straight within the context in which the history of human civilizations heretofore has been framed, taught and studied— and that is the context of race. Crucial to this aspect of the debate are arguments about whether the ancient Egyptians reasonably can be considered to have been black and the extent of significant cultural links between the blacks of sub-Saharan and North Africa. Even more central is the question of whether the record can be set straight by allowing present-day preferences, attitudes and politics justify a potentially distorted view of history, regardless of the obvious distortions produced by the Eurocentric viewpoint in the prior two centuries. Egypt and black identity Many Afrocentrics insist that ancient Egyptians were black African peoples, often emphasizing that this black identity was strongest in early Egyptian history, before the arrival of other people from Asia. The majority of anthropologists and geneticists disagree with this claim and contend that black Africans are part of a separate branch of humans than ancient Egyptians, who shared more culturally, genetically and historically with other groups bordering the Mediterranean Sea. African-centered history and Africa The relationship among racial, cultural and continental identities is one of the more difficult problems in Afrocentic thought. In other instances, the concept of black racial identity has been used to include among "African" peoples populations generally thought of as non-Africans, such as the Australoid (sometimes called "Veddoid") peoples of Australia and New Guinea and the Tamils (also called Dravidians) of India and the people of the rest of the Indian subcontinent. Also included by some writers in the African diaspora are the "Negritos" of Southeast Asia (Thailand, Java, Borneo, Sumatra and Malaysia, Vietnam and Cambodia); the "Africoid," aboriginal peoples of Melanesia, Micronesia, and Polynesia; some Afrocentrists also claim that the Olmecs of what is now Mexico came from Africa, though this is not a widespread view among historians of Mesoamerica.* Afrocentrics who adopt this approach contend that such peoples are African in a racial sense, just as the white inhabitants of Australia may be said to be European. Critics would argue that such peoples were not recent emigrants from Africa, and the entire population of the world might just as reasonably be considered part of an African race according to the Out of Africa model of human migration. Studies show that some members of these darker-skinned ethnic groups and "Mongoloid" East Asians are genetically closer to one another than they are to indigenous Africans. However, some Afrocentrists argue that such genetic similarities are due to the fact that the aboriginal peoples of Asia were "Africoid" Negritos and Australoid types, who later miscegenated and developed in isolation with populations of the eventually more dominant Mongoloid phenotype over time. This fact, they contend, does not change the fundamental black racial identity of these peoples based on the traditional metrics of the classic "Negroid" phenotype, physical similarities with other peoples classified as Negroid, presumptive patterns of prehistoric migrations and, in some cases, what they contend are cultural similarities. Arguments advancing the notion of racial similarities between a Nubian and a Dravidian, both classified as Negroid, Afrocentrists contend, are far more credible than those of between, say, a Swede and a modern-day Turk, both classified as Caucasian. Traditional racial classifications, after all, are not based on genetics, but on phenotype. In such matters, Afrocentrists adopt the pan-Africanist perspective that such people of color are all "African people" or "diasporic Africans." As Afrocentric scholar Runoko Rashidi writes, they are all part of the "global African community." This view, however, rudely disregards how most "Mongoloid" East Asians identifie themselves and the conclusions of geneticists about population relatedness. In 2002, geneticist Spencer Wells completed a study of human out-migrations from Africa utilizing the DNA of San Bushmen of the Kalahari who, according to Wells, have the oldest distinctive DNA lineage on earth. Wells concluded from analysis of DNA specimens that the earliest human emigration from Africa of which there is definitive proof was that of ancestors of the San Bushmen to southern India (the modern Tamils, also known as "Dravidians") and then along coastal routes to Australia (the Aborigines), while shortly afterwards a second migration from Africa, also by ancestors of San Bushmen, reached Central Asia, and thence covered most of the Eurasian continent. The single origin hypothesis (also known as the "Out of Africa" hypothesis) posits that the Homo sapiens evolved in Africa, later migrating and populating other continents, out-competing other related species such as that exemplified by Java man. A different world-view "I am apt to suspect the Negroes...to be naturally inferior to the White. There never was a civilized nation of any other complexion than white...." — David Hume, noted 18th century European historian, philosopher and essayist> "When we classify mankind by colour, the only one of the primary races...which has not made a creative contribution to any of our twenty-one civilizations is the black race." — Arnold J. Toynbee, historian and author "A Black skin means membership in a race of men which has never created a civilization of any kind." — John Burgess, 19th century scholar and founder, Political Science Quarterly* Such blatant racism was common among mainstream scholars, educators and historians well into the 20th century. Afrocentrists contend that the denial and denigration, as well as what they view as the attendant appropriation of, black historical achievement make the study of world history with new eyes an important undertaking. It is in this sense that the Afrocentrist paradigm legitimately may be considered to be "therapeutic." Despite the controversy often associated with it, Afrocentrism is a critical historiographical approach to history, based on a weltanschauung which is fundamentally and radically different from that of many of their relatively recent, Eurocentric predecessors; but which harkens back to an earlier view of the history of world civilizations. It is the examination and analysis of existing scholarship, as well as the study of the original historical record itself, grounded in scholarly inquiry and rigorous research. List of notable Afrocentric historians The Old World; Nature Knows No Color Line; Sex and Race: A History of White, Negro, and Indian Miscegenation in the Two Americas The New World; 100 Amazing Facts About the Negro With Complete Proof: A Short Cut to the World History of the Negro a student's handbook for the study of Ancient Egypt in philosophy, linguistics, and gender relations See also | |||||||||
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